Part 7

Hartley Coleridge, the ærial child who awakened the fears and sympathies of Wordsworth, was a fine boy, rejoicing his parents’ hearts; and the happy pair had cut a road into their neighbours’ orchards, that they might pass to their firesides under the arches of blossoms, with a speed suiting to their affections. Alas! that sweet Stowey. Cottle, in his old age, has painted one or two pictures of it and of its gifted habitants, now in their graves, that go to the heart. Take the scene with Coleridge in the jasmine arbour, where the tripod table was laden with delicious bread and cheese, and a mug of the true brown Taunton ale. ‘While the dappled sunbeams,’ says the old man, calling up kindly memories, ‘played on our table through the umbrageous canopy, the very birds seemed to participate in our felicities, and poured forth selectest anthems. As we sat in our sylvan hall of splendour, a company of the happiest mortals, the bright blue heavens, the sportive insects, the balmy zephyrs, the feathered choristers, the sympathy of friends, all augmented the pleasurable to the highest point this side the celestial.... While thus elevated in the universal current of our feelings, Mrs. Coleridge approached with her fine Hartley; we all smiled, but the father’s eye beamed transcendental joy. But all things have an end! Yet pleasant it is for Memory to treasure up in her choicest depository a few such scenes (those sunny spots in existence), on which the spirit may repose when the rough adverse winds shake and disfigure all besides.’ Or take the more lively visit to Alfoxden, on Wordsworth’s invitation. Away they all went from Stowey; the poet and Emmeline, Coleridge and Cottle. They were to dine on philosopher’s fare--a bottle of brandy, a loaf, a piece of cheese, and fresh lettuces from Wordsworth’s garden. The first mishap was a theftuous abstraction of the cheese; and, on the back of it, Coleridge, in the very act of praising the brandy as a substitute, upset the bottle, and knocked it to pieces. They all tried to take off the harness from the horse. Cottle tried it, then the bard of Rydal; but in vain. Coleridge, who had served his apprenticeship as Silas Comberbatch in the cavalry, then twisted the poor animal’s neck almost to strangulation; but was at last compelled to pronounce that the horse’s head must have grown since the collar was put on! It was useless, he said, to try to force so huge an _os frontis_ through so narrow a collar. All had given up, when lo! the servant girl turned the collar upside down, and slipped it off in an instant, to the inconceivable wonder and humiliation of the poets, who proceeded to solace themselves with the brown bread, the lettuces, and a jug of sparkling water. Who, knowing the subsequent fate of the tenants of Stowey, would not love to dwell on these delightful pictures of their better days?

“It must not be supposed, however, that the tempter never entered into this Eden; but when he did so, it was generally through the mischief-making pranks of Coleridge, who constantly kept his friends in hot water. He and Lamb had just published a joint volume of poems, and Coleridge could not refrain from satirising and parodying their offspring in the newspapers. Take this epigram as a specimen:--

‘TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

‘Your poem must eternal be-- Dear Sir, it cannot fail; For ’tis incomprehensible, And without head or tail.’

Of course nobody could suspect Coleridge of this; and, indeed, to his infinite amusement, a vain fellow affected to hesitate about being introduced to him, on the ground that he had mortally injured him by the writing of this very epigram! But Lamb could not fail to observe the doings of the poet-metaphysician more closely, and the result was a quarrel, which induced that ‘gentle creature’ to send him an unnaturally bitter series of theological questions, such as--‘Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?’ Troubles from without added to this confusion within. The village wiseacres, to whom the habits of Wordsworth and his eccentric friend were totally incomprehensible, had decided that they were terrible scoundrels, who required to be looked after. One sage had seen Wordsworth look strangely at the moon; another had overheard him mutter in some unintelligible and outlandish brogue. Some thought him a conjuror; some a smuggler, from his perpetually haunting the sea-beach; some asserted that he kept a snug private still in his cellar, as they knew by their noses at a hundred yards distance; while others where convinced that he was ‘surely a desperate French Jacobin, for he was so silent nobody ever heard him say one word about politics.’ While the saturnine and stately Wordsworth was thus slanderously assailed, his fluent and witty associate could not expect to escape. One day, accordingly while on a pedestrian excursion, Coleridge met a woman who, not knowing who he was, abused him to himself in unmeasured Billingsgate for a whole hour, as a vile Jacobin villain, who had misled George Burnet of her parish. ‘I listened,’ wrote the poet to a friend, ‘very particularly, appearing to approve all she said, exclaiming, “Dear me!” two or three times; and, in fine, so completely won her heart by my civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her.’ This is all very ludicrous and amusing now; but at the time its effect was such, that the person who had the letting of Alfoxden House refused point-blank to relet it to Wordsworth. This was of course a great vexation to Poole and Coleridge, who set about trying to procure another house in the vicinity.

“But the two bards were not a subject of jealousy and suspicion to the ignorant peasantry alone. A country gentleman of the locality became so alarmed, that he called in the aid of that tremendous abstraction--the state; and a spy was sent down from head-quarters, and lodged in mysterious privacy in Stowey Inn. The poets could never stir out but this gentleman was at their heels, and they scarcely ever had an out-of-doors conversation which he did not overhear. He used to hide behind a bank at the seaside, which was a favourite seat of theirs. At that time they used to talk a great deal of Spinosa; and as their confidential attendant had a notable Bardolph nose, he at first took it into his head that they were making light of his importance by nicknaming him ‘Spy Nosy;’ but was soon convinced that that was the name of a man ‘who had made a book, and lived long ago.’ On one occasion Bardolph assumed the character of a Jacobin, to draw Coleridge out; but such was the bard’s indignant exposure of the Revolutionists, that even the spy felt ashamed that he had put Jacobinism on. Poor Coleridge was so unsuspicious, that he felt happy he had been the means of shaking the convictions of this awful partisan, and doing the unhappy man some good. At last the spy reported favourably, to the great disgust of the rural magnate who had engaged his services, and who now tried to elicit fresh grounds of suspicion from the village innkeeper. But that worthy was obstinate in his belief that it was totally impossible for Coleridge to harangue the inhabitants, as he talked ‘real Hebrew-Greek,’ which their limited intellects could not understand. This, however, only exasperated his inquisitor, who demanded whether Coleridge had not been seen roving about, taking charts and maps of the district. The poor innkeeper replied, that though he did not wish to say any ill of anybody, yet he must confess he had heard that Coleridge was a poet, and intended to put Quantock into print. Thus the friends escaped this peril, which was then a formidable one. Coleridge was at the time wandering about the romantic coombes of the Quantock Hills, making studies for a poem on the plan afterwards followed out by Wordsworth in his ‘Sonnets to the Duddon;’ and in the heat of the moment he resolved to dedicate it to Government, as containing the traitorous plans which he was to submit to the French, in order to facilitate their schemes of invasion. ‘And these, too,’ says he, ‘for a tract of coast that from Clevedon to Minehead scarcely permits the approach of a fishing-boat.’”

This episode brings us back to Wordsworth, and shows, amongst other things, the reason why he left Alfoxden, although not the slightest allusion is made to this spy business, or to the Pantisocratic scheme in the memoirs of the poet by Doctor Wordsworth. The poet’s removal to Bristol sometime about July, in the year 1798, was caused, according to the doctor, by Wordsworth’s “desire to be nearer the printer,” and he (the doctor) quotes a letter from Miss Wordsworth, bearing date July 18th of that year, in which she says, “William’s poems are now in the press; they will be out in six weeks.” These poems, or “Lyrical Ballads,” as they were called, were printed by Cottle, of Bristol, and Wordsworth received thirty guineas as his share, for the copyright of the volume.

“At his first interview with Wordsworth, Cottle had heard some of the lyrical poems read, and had earnestly advised their publication, offering for them the same sum he had given to Coleridge and Southey for their works, and stating flatteringly that no provincial bookseller might ever again have the honour of ushering such a trio to renown. Wordsworth, however, strongly objected to publication; but in April, 1798, the poet sent for Cottle to hear them recited ‘under the old trees in the park.’ Coleridge despatched a confirmatory invitation. ‘We will procure a horse,’ wrote persuasive Samuel Taylor, ‘easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Limouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter’s snow.’ The three friends did go on their romantic excursion, saw sweet Linton and Limouth, and arranged the publication of the first volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ which we have now seen brought to their publication day, and submitted to the judgment of the public. Dr. Wordsworth, however, does not allude in the “Memoirs” to Cottle as one of their party to the Valley of Stones.

The reader of this day, accustomed to dwell with delight and reverence upon the Old Navigator, the Nightingale, Tintern Abbey, &c., will be a little startled to hear that although only five hundred copies of the Lyrical Ballads were printed, Cottle had to dispose of the greater part of them to a London bookseller at a loss, in consequence of the terrific mud-showers of abuse which the critics poured upon the poems. Nevertheless, and in spite of the failure of the adventure, as a commercial speculation, there were minds of no mean order that detected the genius which produced them. Professor Wilson and De Quincy were amongst the number of these; and the former said, in speaking of the Ballads, that a new sun had risen at midday. Hannah More, also, who, notwithstanding her own milk-and-water productions, was a woman of discernment, was delighted with “Harry Gill,” and deigned to say so in the teeth of the dirty demireps that abused it. But the volume gradually sunk for a time below the public horizon, and when Cottle gave up his business, and disposed of his copyright to the Longmans of London, these publishers returned that of the Ballads as valueless, and Cottle made a present of it to its authors.

In the meanwhile, Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge, with the proceeds of their poetry in their pockets, went to Germany. The writer for Chambers says--

“The different temperaments of the poets displayed themselves very remarkably on the voyage. The bard of Rydal seems to have kept very quiet; but his mercurial companion, after indulging in most questionable potations with a motley group of eccentric foreigners, got up and danced with them a succession of dances, which, he says, might very appropriately have been termed _reels_. Where Wordsworth was may be conjectured from Coleridge’s remark, that those ‘who lay below in all the agonies of sea-sickness must have found our Bacchanalian merriment

----“a tune Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.”

One of the party was a Dane, a vain and disgusting coxcomb, whose conversation with Coleridge, whom he first took for a ‘Doctor Teology,’ and then for ‘un philosophe,’ actually outburlesqued burlesque. The astounded bard, for the first time in his life, took notes of a dialogue, of which a single sample is enough.

“THE DANE.--Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! vat eyes! vat a milk white forehead! Oh my heafen! vy, you’re a got!

“ANSWER.--You do me too much honour, sir.

“THE DANE.--Oh me, if you should tink I is flattering you! I haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound a year! Vell, and vat is dhat? Vy, a mere trifle! I ’ould’nt gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money! Yes, you’re a got! I a mere man! But, my dear friend, dhink of me as a man! Is--is--I mean to ask you now, my dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?

“And so his Daneship, in this extraordinary style, went on fishing for compliments, and asking whether he did not speak just like Plato, and Cato, and Socrates, till he lost all opinion of Coleridge on finding that he was a Christian. The discarded poet then wrapped himself in his great-coat, and looked at the water, covered with foam and stars of flame, while every now and then detachments of it ‘darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.’ By and by he lay down, and ‘looking up at two or three stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, fell asleep.’

“They landed at Hamburg, on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom-House. Wordsworth, with a French emigrant, whose acquaintance he had cultivated at sea, went in search of a hotel, and put up at ‘Die Wilde Man,’ while the other wild man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolled about, amusing himself with looking at the ‘Dutch women, with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, and a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind,’ and many similar striking and unusual spectacles.

“In Hamburg the pair were introduced to the brother of the poet Klopstock, and to Professor Ebeling, a lively and intelligent man, but so deaf that they had to ‘drop all their pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.’ At Mr. Klopstock’s they saw a bust of the poet, whom they afterwards visited. It had a solemn and heavy greatness in the countenance, which corresponded with the notions entertained by Coleridge of his style and genius, and which were afterwards discovered not to exist in the prototype himself. Coleridge, whose chief object in coming to Germany was to become acquainted with the German language and literature, left Wordsworth in Hamburg, and went to Ratzeburg, where he boarded in the pastor’s house. He returned, however, for a few days, to take final leave of his friend, and the two paid a visit to Klopstock together. His house was one of a row of what appeared small summer-houses, with four or five rows of young meagre elms in front, and beyond these a green, bounded by a dead flat. The bard’s physiognomy disappointed them as much as his domicile. Coleridge recognised in it no likeness to the bust, and no traces either of sublimity or enthusiasm. Klopstock could only speak French and German, and Coleridge only English and Latin, so that Wordsworth, who was accomplished in French, acted as interpreter. It may here be mentioned that this ignorance of Coleridge’s brought upon him a peculiar sort of civility at Ratzeburg. The _amtmann_ of that place, anxious to be civil, and totally unable to find any medium of communication, every day they met, as the only courtesy he had it in his power to offer, addressed to him the whole stock of English he possessed, which was to this effect:-- ‘----ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander, vhee goes it?’ The conversation with Klopstock turned entirely upon English and German literature, and in the course of it Wordsworth gave ample proofs of his great taste, industry, and information, and even showed that he was better acquainted with the highest German writers than the author of the ‘Messiah’ himself. On his informing the latter that Coleridge intended to translate some of his odes, the old man said to Coleridge--‘I wish you would render into English some select passages of the “Messiah,” and _revenge_ me of your countrymen.’ ‘This,’ says Coleridge, ‘was the liveliest thing he produced in the whole conversation.’ That genius was, however, deeply moved, but could not help being disgusted with the venerable bard’s snow-white periwig, which felt to his eye what Mr. Virgil would have been to his ear. After this, Coleridge left Hamburg, and resided four months in Ratzeburg, and five in Gottingen. Wordsworth had two subsequent interviews with Klopstock, and dined with him. He kept notes of these conversations, some of which are given in ‘Satyrane’s Letters,’ in the second volume of the ‘Biographia Literaria.’ One or two incidents strongly illustrate Wordsworth’s peculiar character and poetical taste. He complained, for example, of Lessing making the interest of the ‘Oberon’ turn upon mere appetite. ‘Well, but,’ said Klopstock, ‘you see that such poems please everybody.’ He immediately replied, that ‘it was the province of a great poet to raise a people up to his own level--not to descend to theirs.’ Klopstock afterwards found fault with the Fool in ‘Lear,’ when Wordsworth observed that ‘he gave a terrible wildness to the distress’--a remark which evinced a deep appreciation of that awful drama. Wordsworth subsequently made a short tour, and visited Coleridge at Gottingen on his return.’

Wordsworth, during the greater part of his time in Germany lived at Goslar, and he found the people neither very friendly nor hospitable. Goslar is situate at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, which are covered with fine oaks and beech, and the poet and his sister, to make up for the loss of society in the town, sought solitude amongst these magnificent woods. Among the poems written at this time were, “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” “Lines to a Sexton,” “The Danish Boy,” intended as a prelude to a ballad never written; “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Art thou a Statist?” “Lucy Gray.” All these poems and many more were written in 1799; and the latter is founded on a circumstance related by the poet’s sister “of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other footsteps of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe’s matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement,--far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may enlarge the circle of their sympathies, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.” “Lines written in Germany, ’98-9” have the following note attached to them in the “Memoirs,” with which I will conclude these extracts.

“A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed, by the side of my sister, in our lodgings at a draper’s house, in the romantic imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest. In this town the German emperors of the Franconian line were accustomed to keep their court, and it retains vestiges of ancient splendour. So severe was the cold of this winter that when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, our cheeks were struck by the air as if by cold iron. I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog-skin bonnet, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts, in a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I consequently became much attached to it.” During these walks he composed the ‘Poet’s Epitaph.’ His ‘Poem of Ruth,’ ‘The Address to the Scholars of a Village School,’ ‘The two April Mornings,’ ‘The Fountain,’ ‘A Conversation,’ ‘Matthew,’ and a variety of others were likewise written about this time. In his correspondence with Coleridge at this time, the latter speaks in terms of the highest affection for him. ‘I am sure I need but say,’ he writes, ‘how you are incorporated with the better part of my being; how whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side.’”

On the 10th of February, 1799, Wordsworth and his sister left Goslar, and returned towards England. The poet was now nearly thirty years of age; and as the gates of the Imperial City closed behind him, he felt like a bird suddenly released from captivity, and resolved to build up some stately architecture of verse, which men would not willingly let die. Accordingly he commenced the “Prelude,” within the very hum of the city. Six out of the fourteen books which compose it, were written before 1805.

In the spring of 1799 the poet and his sister returned to England; and in a letter to Cottle, written immediately after their arrival, we find them in “the county of Durham, just on the borders of Yorkshire,” thankful, after sufficient experience of Germany, for the dear face of old England once more.

GRASMERE.

THE wandering minstrel and his sister--that great-hearted, most beautiful, and devoted sister, whom we cannot help loving so devoutly,--went in the spring of 1799 to visit their friends, the Hutchinsons, at Stockton-on-Tees, and remained there, with occasional exceptions, until the close of the year. Here dwelt Miss Mary Hutchinson, for whom the poet had begun to conceive such passion as he was capable of from the time of her visit to him and his sister, at Alfoxden. For although Dr. Wordsworth is silent also respecting this visit, De Quincy tells us that it actually took place.--And now the lovers--in their saturnine way--had leisure to cement their attachment, and what is more, they took advantage of it, as their subsequent marriage, about the commencement of the present century, sufficiently proves.--Many other things, however, occupied the poet’s attention beside this, and we find him, September 20, planning another tour, and this time through the lake district, with his friends Cottle and Coleridge. It was the first time that the latter had seen the lake country, and he, in writing to Miss Wordsworth, thus speaks of it:--

“At Temple Sowerby we met your brother John, who accompanied us to Hawes-water, Ambleside, and the divine sisters, Rydal and Grasmere. Here we stayed two days. We accompanied John over the fork of Helvellyn, on a day when light and darkness co-existed in contiguous masses, and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her grandest accidents. We quitted him by a wild turn, just as we caught a sight of the gloomy Ullswater.